How I Solved It: New York or Lahore?

The pull of New York City is universally understood. The pull of Lahore perhaps requires a little more explanation.

ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA PARINI; ANIMATION BY JOSE LORENZO

My grandfather lived outside the country of his birth only briefly. For me, residency has been a more complicated matter. At the age of three, I was a Pakistani child newly arrived in California, speaking Urdu but not a word of English. At the age of nine, I was a California boy plopped into Lahore, speaking English but not a word of Urdu. At eighteen, I was both a foreign student and not a foreign student, having arrived a week early for international orientation at college, in New Jersey. A year of writing in Lahore followed, then three of law school in Boston. At twenty-six, thoroughly mongrelized, I began a job in New York City.

Ah, I loved New York. And that was the problem. For I loved Lahore, too. I was baffled by the question of where I should live. New York was my present, Lahore was my past, and a future without either felt inconceivable, like a choice between food and drink. In my bafflement, I refused to buy an apartment, and missed out on the property boom of the late nineties. I wreaked havoc on my romantic relationships. Few things in the realm of love are more exhausting than a partner who is geographically unsettled. I planned to leave New York as soon as my student loans were repaid, and then abruptly changed my mind when the day came.

The pull of New York is universally understood. The pull of Lahore perhaps requires a little more explanation. In the Punjab, people say, “Lahore’s Lahore.” What else could a city need to be? Punjabis also say, “Who hasn’t seen Lahore hasn’t begun life,” because Lahore’s a sexy old city, a big, music- and food-loving, riverine easy. The American city that reminded me most of Lahore’s vibe was New Orleans. But the pull of Lahore wasn’t, for me, just about Lahore. It was about my parents, my sister, my friends, my cousins. And I have a lot of cousins. We could play eleven-a-side cricket against one another and fill a reserve bench. I was homesick in New York, even as my life was unfolding excitingly: my first job, first apartment, first serious adult love, first published novel.

Douglas Adams writes, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, that the secret to flying is throwing yourself at the ground and missing. I adopted the same approach to the question of where I should live. I tried throwing myself at the ground someplace else. I went to London on what I thought was a yearlong transfer with my consulting firm. But I arrived a month before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and a door slammed shut behind me. The era of people with names and faces like mine zipping through J.F.K. Airport was over. I wound up staying in London eight years. I met my wife—a Pakistani-born, American-educated British citizen—who well understood my geographic dilemma.

But my ache grew more pronounced. In London, I didn’t just miss Lahore. I missed New York, too. Once again, I sat out a great property boom. But my second novel sold well enough for me to write full time, and eventually, after a series of conversations with my wife, who was less than keen on uprooting ourselves, we moved to Lahore.

I spent much of my first year in Lahore fantasizing about leaving Lahore—secretly, because my wife forbade me to indulge in discussions of departure so soon. I was with my parents, my sister, my friends, my cousins. And, like an idiot, I pined for New York: my other friends, the neighborhoods I could not forget, the writers I had grown up with, the energy and the anonymity. It seemed that yet again I had thrown myself at the ground and failed to fly.

But Adams tells us that we fly not through action but through distraction. We stop paying attention to our ostensible goal as we throw ourselves at the ground. And, in that moment, we miss, and we find that we are flying. In Lahore, I was neither a student nor someone with a regular job. And so, as I went about writing my books and seeing my friends and helping raise our children, I was newly free to travel. We spent months abroad. When a friend in New York left his apartment for the summer, we took it. And slowly my ache diminished. It seemed I had been thinking about my problem in the wrong way. Whether to live in Lahore or New York was an impossible question. How to live so I could spend meaningful time in both was not. Journeying between them was my answer. It remains my answer, even as the dread of a possible travel ban floats somewhere out there, waiting like a spider on the edge of my delicate web.